Three months ago, I speculated that Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming book, then titled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, was the victim of a swift and violent paradigm shift. The 2006 elections and the right's critical drubbing of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11--which proposed a strategic alliance between Muslim theocrats and the American right against the degenerate American left—had rendered conservatism's lunatic fringe suddenly unfashionable. This couldn't, I thought, be good news for a book that portrayed Hillary Clinton as a goose-stepping brownshirt.

...is that it is somehow rude to hold politicians--especially right-of-center politicians--to the standard of behaving with honor or serving the public interest, and even ruder to point out that the Washington press corps village should call them on it. Ron Fournier of the National Journal, for example, calls it "name calling".

Nieman Storyboard: "In what might be the only performance of Texas stand-up comedy about narrative writing...

...Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough recently offered practical tips for long-form storytelling to a Mayborn Conference audience. Prior to his magazine career, Burrough spent several years reporting for The Wall Street Journal; he has also written five books, including Public Enemies and Barbarians at the Gate. In these excerpts from his talk, Burrough addresses the best transition word ever, presents his strategy for avoiding writer’s block, and reminds you that “your words are not nearly as great as you think they are.”

If a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on addictive to have a storyline

Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University back in April:

And then once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving that borders on blindness to shoehorn every fact, every development, every thing that happens into the story line, even if it’s not the story....

That's an interesting comment from Bill Clinton. Is it true? Well, check this out from the start of Cillizza's column:

The only change Fareed Zakaria made was to (a) delete David Leonhardt's explanation of who had actually done the work to calculate the numbers, while (b) failing to put David Leonhardt's words in quotation marks, and (c) failing to provide a pointer to David Leonhardt's column.

...struck many readers as completely off-base. Many called it offensive. Some went further, saying it was racist. Another reference to the actress Viola Davis as 'less classically beautiful' than lighter-skinned African American actresses immediately inspired a mocking hashtag.... I have asked Ms. Stanley for further comment (she has said that her intentions were misunderstood, and seemed to blame the Twitter culture for that.... Culture editor, Danielle Mattoon.... 'There was never any intent to offend anyone and I deeply regret that it did', Ms. Mattoon said. 'Alessandra used a rhetorical device to begin her essay, and because the piece was so largely positive, we as editors weren’t sensitive enough to the language being used'. Ms. Mattoon called the article 'a serious piece of criticism', adding, 'I do think there were interesting and important ideas raised that are being swamped' by the protests. She told me that multiple editors--at least three--read the article in advance but that none of them raised any objections...

...today purports to address Alessandra Stanley's famously-flawed appraisal of Walter Cronkite on July 18, and to explain how the TV critic could end up with a whopping 8-error correction. But while Hoyt names several editors who failed to catch the mistakes in Stanley's piece, he ignores the deeper question on readers' minds. How does a television critic who has had 91 corrections of her work in just six years get to keep her job? Nowhere in Hoyt's 1,228-word essay today does the Public Editor address the question of what consequences Stanley has faced as a result of her epic fail on July 18. By focusing on the mechanics of the screw-up--which includes naming editors who read the piece and who didn't fact-check it--Hoyt bypasses the issue of a systemic breakdown at the NYT that led to the error-riddled essay.

We are interrupting our DeLong Smackdown Watches (and other things to bring you news that International Economy is now in the running for the Washington Post for the title of publication that exercises the very least quality control--that takes the least care to make sure that the articles it publishes inform rather than mislead their readers.

Over at Equitable Growth: As best as I have been able to determine, the thinking among the executives and editors of the Washington Post who commissioned and published this piece back in September 2008 was roughly: "We need to publish an economy-is-actually-in-good-shape piece so that the McCain campaign and the Republicans won't be made at us". Whether the piece was true, whether the numbers quoted in it were accurate or representative, or even whether the author had a conceptually and analytically interesting perspective did not enter their thinking at all. For none of those conditions were satisfied.

I have been waiting ever since for somebody in the Washington Post to decide that they need to commission somebody to do a deep dive about how and why this piece got commissioned and published, and how they drifted so very very far away from the idea that a newspaper exists to inform its readers about the world.

I suppose I am going to have to keep waiting, and when the last piece of newsprint spins through the Washington Post presses and the last update is posted to the Washington Post servers, it will still not have dared to come clean with its readers about what went so wrong.

The Economist editorial on GWB was about as readable as a Socialist Workers' Party caucus statement, and presumably for exactly the same reason; it was drafted by a commitee of about eight, about three of whom were aware that what they were supporting was unsupportable. Clive Crook's response absolutely confirms me in this view...

Rick Perlstein has a new book... and he’s facing completely spurious charges of plagiarism.... The people making the charges--almost all of whom have, surprise, movement conservative connections--aren’t pointing to any actual passages that, you know, were lifted.... Instead, they’re claiming that Perlstein paraphrased what other people said.... Can I say, I’m familiar with this process? There was a time when various of the usual suspects went around claiming that I was doing illegitimate things with jobs data; what I was doing was in fact perfectly normal--but that didn’t stop Daniel Okrent, the outgoing public editor, from firing a parting shot (with no chance for me to reply) accusing me of fiddling with the numbers. I also heard internally that there were claims of plagiarism directed at me, too, but evidently they couldn’t cook up enough stuff to even pretend to make that stick. The thing to understand is that fake accusations of professional malpractice are a familiar tactic for these people. And this tactic should be punctured by the press, not given momentum with 'opinions differ on shape of the planet' reporting."

...you have no doubt noticed that many of their publications are, well, fact-challenged.... Today, I turn from Obamacare godfather Stuart Butler to the new Heritage chief economist, Stephen Moore.... SantaFeMarie sums up the sordid story of Moore's July 7 column in the Kansas City Star where, trying to defend himself and Arthur Laffer from the well-deserved ire of Paul Krugman, he claims that 0/low-tax states have seen better job growth than high-tax states. In the original article, he wrote:

No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years, California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops.

...showing that the proportion of adults lacking health insurance has fallen by a quarter, from 20 percent of the population to 15 percent. (Most respondents, including 74 percent of newly insured Republicans, report liking their plan.) Also, this week, the Congressional Budget Office again revised down its cost estimates for Medicare, which now spends $50 billion a year less than it was projected to before Obamacare passed. Also, the New England Journal of Medicine recently estimated that 20 million Americans gained insurance under the new law.

...reading Sam Tanenhaus's New York Times Magazine cover story on the reform conservative movement. (Title: "Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas?" I'll answer that: No.)....

I'd just like to note one anecdote involving John Murray, Eric Cantor's deputy chief of staff.... 'Self-identified Tea Party supporters... [and] moderate swing voters... aside from a few hot-button ideological issues, the two groups sounded alike. Their paramount concerns were nagging "kitchen-table-centric" issues. In Murray's paraphrase: "Fuel prices are up. Grocery bills are up. The kids are home now, but who's going to help us get them to college?" The respondents were not Obama fans, but they also felt as if the Republicans weren't helping them, either."...

Robert Samuelson thinks that the Export-Import Bank is a waste of government money.

He is nevertheless opposed to cutting it.

How does he reconcile (1) and (2)? Word salad: "The congressional fuss over the renewal of its charter is... political grandstanding. The Ex-Im Bank is portrayed... by tea party conservatives as a citadel of 'crony capitalism'... government bloat that’s bleeding taxpayers.... This is... wildly misleading. It suggests... Congress is getting serious about trimming... when it isn’t..."

"Let's not do a good thing because some people I don't like will claim that it is a more important good thing than it is" is an argument one level of rationality below "get off my lawn!" or "old man yelling at clouds".

The absence these days of what I regard as high-quality critiques of my writings on the internet poses me a substantial intellectual problem, since I have this space and this feature on my weblog: the DeLong Smackdown Watch. What should I do with it? I have decided that, until and unless my critics step up their game, I'm going to devote the Monday DeLong Smackdown space to a close reading of chapter 11 of David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. And to telegraph the conclusion: yes, like chapter 12, chapter 11 of David Graeber's Debt: The First Five Thousand Years is itself in chapter 11, if not chapter 7:

And so we get to the beginning of the text of chapter 11 of David Graeber's Debt:

...presents a historic opportunity for change. Its proponents call it “settled law,” but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law--if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans can see a clear alternative. This fall’s website fiasco and policy cancellations are only the beginning. Next spring the individual mandate is likely to unravel when we see how sick the people are who signed up on exchanges, and if our government really is going to penalize voters for not buying health insurance. The employer mandate and “accountable care organizations” will take their turns in the news. There will be scandals. There will be fraud. This will go on for years...

...in a frenzy that even the awfulness of events in Ukraine and many other places doesn’t quite explain. The reason, according to Leon Wieseltier, David Brooks, and other prophets of American Destiny, is that (as I quoted Wieseltier here on March 10) President Obama “is not raising the country up, he is tutoring it in ruefulness and futility…”

...to review the book. The intention, she said, was not to produce a particular point of view or to somehow exact revenge....

We chose Michael Kinsley, a frequent contributor to the Book Review (he recently reviewed “Double Down” for us, and before that “Going Clear”), because he has decades of experience in news journalism as well as in book criticism, has written extensively about the media and current affairs, and is thoughtful and smart...

How dumb does Pamela Paul think we are? You hire Michael Kinsley only when you explicitly want his "particular point of view". That's what he does--he does not bring deep substantive expertise or the ability to produce a balanced assessment of arguments or an ability to draw a bright line between matters of empirical fact and matters of philosophical value. He brings his particular point of view.

Usually the Monday Smackdown Watch is focused on smacking-down me: to feature people who think that I have gotten something wrong, and who want to urge me to mark my beliefs to market.

But I am out of candidates. Step up your game, people!

So we do what we can:

Somewhat more than once a year Michael Kinsley writes another column about how hyperinflation threatens and (usually) about how Paul Krugman and company are mean, arrogant, and wrong. So last year when it happened I put a reminder in my tickler file to look around in May 2014 and see if:

Kinsley has done it again; or

Kinsley has marked his beliefs to market; admitted that Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen are not Arthur Burns and G. William Miller, Barack Obama is not Gerald Ford; and recognized that taking Robert Samuelson and Allan Meltzer rather than Paul Krugman, Alan Blinder, and Larry Summers as your economic gurus is a really bad idea, atoning for which requires apology, correction, and a very substantial financial contribution to aid those Americans whom the intellectual climate he has promoted have robbed of their normal jobs.

So far we have neither: no additional doubling-down, no acknowledgement of error, no substantial charitable contributions to aid the excess unemployed...

Dan Drezner's classic 2013 Kinsley smackdown: "Look, this isn't rocket science--Kinsley made an argument about austerity that got a lot of basic economic facts about the 1970s and the current era very, very wrong. Dare I say, spectacularly and obviously wrong. So there's really no point in further discussion..."

If you have done something for four years in a row--even as the mountain of evidence that you are wrong piles up higher and higher--you do owe something more than radio silence to your readership: you have already double-double-double-double-doubled-down; so double-down again, or fold. Radio silence is undignified, and cheap.

David Brooks pens a paean to technocratic autocracies like Singapore and suggests that the US needs to "make democracy dynamic again" if it's going to keep up. How will it make democracy dynamic again? Glad you asked:

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms. The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms--on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc.--and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through.

Of course, there already was a Simpson-Bowles-type commission that overwhelmingly rallied establishment opinion to its side. It was called the Simpson-Bowles commission. And it failed. So did its descendants like the Senate's Gang of Six and the Supercommittee. Whatever you think of the Simpson-Bowles plan, the outcome proved that these kinds of elite committees aren't able to browbeat their plans through Congress. The outcome of Simpson-Bowles is a big part of the reason some in Washington have begun envying the decisiveness of East Asian autocracies, not a model for how the US can mimic their decisiveness...

I confess, if I myself wanted to plant a piece by a right-wing economist in the Wall Street Journal to demonstrate that they and it are either (a) completely disconnected from and uninterested in reality and in marking their beliefs to market, or (b) completely cynical and uninterested in anything but misleading their readers, I could not come up with anything more effective than this:

...The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that food prices will rise as much as 3.5% this year, the biggest annual increase in three years. Over the past 12 months from March, the consumer-price index increased 1.5% before seasonal adjustment. These are warnings... the U.S. has been printing money—and in a reckless fashion—for years.

A twelve-month CPI inflation rate of 1.5%/year is a "warning" of the consequences of "printing money--and in a reckless fashion"? Shouldn't one of the interns who reads the electrons before they are committed to the database fire off an email to Paul Gigot saying: "Do we want to look that ridiculous?"?

Jedediah Purdy:To Have and Have Not: "Piketty recommends a small, progressive global tax on capital to draw down big fortunes and press back against r > g. He admits this idea won’t get much traction at present, but recommends it as a... measure of what would be worth doing and how far we have to go to get there. It’s an excellent idea, but it also shows the limits of Piketty’s argument. He has no theory of how the economy works that can replace the optimistic theories that his numbers devastate. Numbers — powerful ones, to be sure — are what he has.... Without a theory of how the economy produces and allocates value, we can’t know whether r > g will hold into the future. This is essential to whether Piketty can answer his critics, who have argued that we shouldn’t worry much... [because other economic forces will] blunt r > g. Piketty doesn’t really have an answer to these challenges, other than the weight of the historical numbers....

"We should grope toward a more general theory of capitalism by getting more systematic about two recurrent themes in Piketty’s work: a) power matters and b) the division of income between capital and labor is one of the most important questions.... The period of shared growth in the mid-20th century was not just the aftermath of war and depression. It was also the apex of organized labor’s power in Europe and North America....

"Piketty shows that capitalism’s attractive moral claims — that it can make everyone better off while respecting their freedom — deserve much less respect under our increasingly 'pure' markets than in the mixed economies that dominated the North Atlantic countries in the mid-20th century. It took a strong and mobilized left to build those societies. It may be that capitalism can remain tolerable only under constant political and moral pressure from the left, when the alternative of democratic socialism is genuinely on the table.... Reading Piketty gives one an acute sense of how much we have lost with the long waning of real political economy, especially the radical kind.... Ideas need movements, as movements need ideas. We’ve been short on both..." READ MOAR

...but the quality of the criticism it has attracted provides a sense of the strength of the argument he makes. Consider Clive Crook....

There's a persistent tension between the limits of the data he presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws.

The line doubles as a pleasingly apt description of Mr Crook's review. He is unhappy.... Why... doesn't Mr Piketty say that r must be significantly above g to generate the expected divergence, Mr Crook complains.... You don't even have to read hundreds of pages to get the qualification Mr Crook wants; you can start with the page on which r>g is first mentioned:

If, moreover, the rate of return on capital remains significantly above the growth rate for an extended period of time (which is more likely when the growth rate is low, though not automatic), then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high....

If you only read the book's conclusion you could miss these details, but who would do that? Mr Crook then goes on to present his evidence:

The trouble is, he also shows that capital-to-output ratios in Britain and France in the 18th and 19th centuries, when r exceeded g by very wide margins, were stable, not rising inexorably....

Mr Piketty is not arguing that r>g means that rising inequality is inevitable. Indeed, that is close to the precise opposite of his argument, which is that r>g is a force for divergence.... If charts of stable capital-income ratios in the 19th century provided a devastating rebuttal to his story, Mr Piketty would not have included them so prominently.... I think he must have imagined that readers would look at the text around them as well....

Mr Crook rather uncharitably questions the motivations of those more taken with the book. He writes:

As I worked through the book, I became preoccupied with another gap: the one between the findings Piketty explains cautiously and statements such as, "The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying." Piketty's terror at rising inequality is an important data point for the reader. It has perhaps influenced his judgment and his tendentious reading of his own evidence. It could also explain why the book has been greeted with such erotic intensity....

It seems to me that Mr Crook has revealed more about his own priors than those of Mr Piketty's fans. "Terrifying" seems to me to be an accurate description of a society in which the top 10% of individuals own 90% of the wealth. Mr Crook scoffs.... That brings us to the most important of Mr Crook's criticisms: that it is living standards which actually matter.... Even if the book had nothing to say about growth, this would be an odd criticism.... What Mr Crook seems not to understand is that we also care about it because we care about living standards... high levels and concentrations of capital have not been a necessary or sufficient condition for rapid growth... have often sowed the seeds for political backlash... detrimental to long-run growth. His argument is that the living standards of many people around the rich world are now unnecessarily low, because of the nonchalance with which elites have approached distributional issues.... His argument is that economic growth that concentrates benefits on a small group of people will probably not be tolerated as fair, even if living standards among the masses are not completely stagnant.

It is an argument that is powerful and well-supported by the data—and extremely relevant today, whether or not one thinks inequality qualifies as the defining issue of the era. That, it seems to me, is why the book has been received as it has.

The first is the almost always reliable and very sharp James K. Galbraith, who--for some reason I don't understand--thinks that Piketty intends his Capital to be a book about production rather than about distribution. And as a result I think his review goes awry: James K. Galbraith

Considerably worse is James Pethokoukis, who seems to have no arguments at all. It appears to be an attempt to shore up his wingnut street-cred by throwing some red meat to the base, and to shore up his pop-culture street-cred via gratuitous Galaxy Quest references. I cannot speak to how well the first works. The second, however, is an absolute flop: he reveals that he does not remember Galaxy Quest very well, and does not talk to any friends he may have who do: James Pethokoukis

You know that Tesla Model S on 60 Minutes on Sunday that was unusually vocal? CBS is now admitting there were some noises accompanying footage of that car being driven that should not have been there.... A CBS spokesperson gave a statement to Fox News today about the problem:

Our video editor made an audio editing error in our report about Elon Musk and Tesla last night. We regret the error and it is being corrected online.

...has a long record of harsh criticisms of the climate science community, impugning the motives, ethics, and honesty of climate scientists and communicators. Bonus: find out what he thinks about Grist readers (#79) Quotations are arranged in reverse chronological order, going back to 2004. Originally published at Hill Heat. Hat tip to former Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh researcher Marc Morano...

...that including costs incurred from natural disasters completely unrelated to climate change (e.g. earthquakes or volcano eruptions) also is a deadly sin against correct data-driven analysis. These non-climate-related disasters add a lot of noise to the data and make it needlessly harder to identify the impact of climate change on the global cost due to natural disasters, unless of course it was the author's intent to muddle the analysis.

Touché...

In fact, when you look at the data Pielke uses to establish his claim that costs of natural disasters are (a) growing over time but (b) not growing faster than one would expect given growing wealth, you wonder why Nate Silver or somebody else didn't bounce the article immediately.

The big enchilada in Pielke's 1990-2013 graph is the 2011 Honshu Earthquake:

Conditional on the Honshu Earthquake happening in his sample, it is just pure chance that the Honshu Earthquake happened at the end rather than at the beginning. And if the Honshu Earthquake had happened in, say, 1991, it would have done more damage: the Japanese economy has not grown materially since 1990, and Japanese earthquake safety standards have materially improved.

When the shape of one's quantitative argument about the costs of global warming hinges on a huge and damaging earthquake occurring at the end rather than near the beginning of one's sample, one can be said to be doing many things--but not data science...

Nate Silver goes from hero to goat, convicted by the Left of apostasy: Pity Nate Silver. Hero of the Left for his successful take-down of GOP’s election forecasts, shooting down their delusions about Romney’s chances of victory. Good Leftists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman heaped praises on Silver, catapulting him into a sweet gig at ESPN. The poor guy thought the applause was for his use of numbers in pursuit in truth, when it was purely tribal. Their applause were just tribal grunts — we good, they bad — in effect chanting: “Two legs good. Four legs bad.” Right out of the box at his new venture, ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, Silver committed apostasy, and the Left reacted with the fury true believers mete out to their betrayers. He posted “Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change” by Roger Pielke, Jr....

Since, as I said, I had forgotten about the existence of Roger Pielke, Jr., I was somewhat annoyed at being told that my applause for Silver had just been a "tribal grunt". So I asked: READ MOAR

This morning, David Leonhardt gets a story about John McCain on page A1--and buries the lead in paragraph 23:

The real lead in paragraph 23:

McCain’s Fiscal Mantra Becomes Less Is More: On several occasions over the last year, Mr. McCain has said that tax cuts can reduce the deficit by spurring additional activity that, in turn, leads to more taxes being paid. But numerous studies have found that not to be the case.... During his campaign, Mr. McCain has focused much more on spending [cuts] than on taxes. He has called for the end of earmarks.... They are “a very small part of the budget,” he said, “but so symbolic.”... McCain would consider cutting the programs that the White House has identified as ineffective... has not specified which ones it would cut. In addition to Amtrak, the list includes various programs dealing with Defense Department communications, veterans’ disability and low-income heating assistance...

Many of the issues that we debate are not issues of fact but issues of value. There is no numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men, and the question of whether the government should help the weak, and the question of whether we should intervene against genocide. And so the intimidation by quantification practiced by Silver and the other data mullahs must be resisted.

But there is very much a "numerical answer to the question of whether men should be allowed to marry men".... Opponents... say that children suffer harm from not having two opposite-sex parents.... We can look at the lives of children raised by gay couples and compare their well-being to that of children raised by married heterosexuals. If gay marriage were harming the children of gay couples, we'd know it, but it isn't. And it's good that we have studies showing a lack of harm, because if we were high-mided and Wieseltierian and chose to remain above the tawdry collection of data on this subject, the anti-gay right would generate all sorts of anti-gay-marriage data and drive the debate with it.... There is also very much a "numerical answer" to "the question of whether the government should help the weak".... We're not discussing this on the basis of morality, as Wieseltier airily suggests; we don't simply assume that government has a responsibility to help the weak because the right incessantly argues that it can demonstrate the failure of any such efforts -- with data.

And as for genocide: Does Wieseltier seriously believe that we regard intervention as an unquestioned duty? If so, how does he explain the fact that we intervene in some genocides and not others? Why does he suppose that is? I'd argue that our leaders consider morality, but also calculate the potential cost in blood and treasure, while pondering poll numbers for or against intervention. I don't what the hell Wieseltier's explanation would be.

I haven’t read Rachel Maddow’s new book, Drift. That is because, unlike The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, I am not a book critic. I am a national security professional. This means that – also unlike Wieseltier – I spend my days immersed in the thinking and writing of defense experts and policymakers – in the U.S. government, in the military, in other nations, in the non-governmental sector. Wieseltier has written a review of Drift in which he takes issue with, well, a lot of things – the fact that Maddow has a TV show among them. But his core problem seems to be her suggestion that we might have a societal problem with “the artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities.” He really ought to spend more time with defense intellectuals. Since they tend to be men, many of them with chests of medals, and few of them given to open mockery, he might prefer them to Maddow, whose style he objects to as “perky” and “absurdist.” (Irrelevant question: there is a great literary and indeed political tradition of absurdism – has any of it ever before been described as “perky?”)

It appears that Wieseltier would be rather surprised to hear some of the things these serious folk have to say about the state of our society – and the extent to which we fetishize defense above all else to our peril.

“A plane going down is not supposed to be a mystery,” he told me over dinner recently, marveling that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 still had not been found after disappearing a week ago. “The only thing more troubling than a surveillance state,” he went on, “is one that can keeps track of all your Gmail contacts but can’t keep track of a plane falling out from the sky. What the f---?” What the f---, indeed. Why is it so easy to click around the world and see what’s going on in, say, downtown Cophenhagen or the backroads in northern Tasmania and not find a Boeing 777, an aerial opus of engineering and technology with a takeoff weight of half a million pounds and the wing span of a 20-story building? But this dissonance doesn't entirely explain the frenzied mediascape surrounding the story. I've found myself asking a different question: Do we really want to find this missing plane at all? The families of the victims deserve answers, of course, but as the days go on and more nautical miles are searched for missing debris, there’s an undeniable urge for investigators to keep on looking, not find anything, and let the mystery endure.

Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein watch the toddlers on the bus--the American campaign press corps. The only solution I see is simply to shut them all down: the modern style of campaign coverage started by Teddy White in 1960 with his The Making of the President is pernicious and harmful. Its practitioners should all be sent to do something more useful. Proofreading Google Books comes to mind.

So I was going back through my archives for January 2008, looking at what I was thinking about the state of the macroeconomy at the time, and I cannot help but republish this piece on how awful the New York Times's political coverage is--there is a reason that the only thing people paid attention to in 2012 was Nate Silver, there is a reason for the New York Times to immediately and drastically downsize the rest of its national news staff and let David Leonhardt's operation grow, there is a reason why all of you should henceforth only buy products advertised on Vox: Understand the News:

Okay, maybe Everett Dirksen was a warm-hearted boodler; he was still a boodler. And if he is the best you can offer... But does Kaiser remember-- no, actually, I guess he doesn't remember--the 80th Congress, the Do-Nothing Congress, the Congress that made it their business that Harry S Truman accomplished nothing, nothing, in what they confidently assumed would be the sunset of his incumbency?

And I think: That level of engagement (and revenue!) on the part of readers would, one would think, lead to a substantial infrastructure supporting marquee columnists to make sure that their columns were the best columns possible. I mean: readers are spending a substantial fraction of a year of income plus attention on this, and if the New York Times spends 10% as much in resources on it as its readers, that would be 104 reporter and editorial person-hours backing up each 750-word column.

And so, one would think, in the twenty-first century, that Nick Kristof would, as he wrote his column, know what his own newspaper announced just two days ago:

Meg Sullivan: Vavreck to help fill void in New York Times left by popular blogger Nate Silver: “UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck is joining a team of reporters, analysts and other contributors who will be posting to a new website on politics and policy in The New York Times that will launch in the spring with a focus on demystifying politics, economics, health care and other issues with data. Read More

Eagle-eyed readers quickly noticed that the "Hot Hashtag" in Playbook hadn't actually been used by anyone on Twitter.... [Mike] Allen explained....

It's a reference--figurative, not literal--to how the debt-ceiling vote went down last night. By adopting the rule on voice vote, they avoided a potential procedural detour or roadblock. People who had been at the Capitol for the vote were buzzing about it at dinner afterward, and jokingly suggested that hashtag. Part of what makes D.C. so D.C.!

Playbook was delivered at about 9:22 A.M. Wednesday. The first tweets using the "hot" #VoiceTheRule hashtag appeared a little over 20 minutes later and expressed confusion.... As of this writing, all eight tweets on the #VoiceTheRule hashtag came from authors who were wondering what it all meant.

Q: Will 2.5 Million People Lose Their Jobs in 2024 Because of the ACA?

A: No.

We would not describe our estimates in that way. We wrote in the report: “CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor.”…

Because the longer-term reduction in work is expected to come almost entirely from a decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply in response to the changes in their incentives, we do not think it is accurate to say that the reduction stems from people “losing” their jobs.

Chris Cilizza is one of the best reporters the Washington Post has now that the Wonkblog crew is heading off to Vox Media. Chris Cilizza also sees nothing odd or ironic in writing:

Chris Cilizza: Why the CBO report is (still) bad news for Democrats: My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument, but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality…

Note the assumptions here:

That what actually happens to Americans as ObamaCare is implemented is not the “real world”

That the real world is the world of “campaign politics”

That in this real world of campaign politics reality does not count–”perception trumps”

That it is not his job to report on the “rightness of the argument” about what the consequences of ObamaCare implementation will be for all those Americans who do not live in the real world of campaign politics but, instead live somewhere else

That it is his job to report on the perceptions of campaign politics–because that is the real world

And at this point, all you can do is quote extensively from Plato’s Republic, the passage on the Allegory of the Cave, and urge Jeff Bezos to immediately change the culture of the Washington Post completely so that it can at least try to step up its game...

Perkins’s letter provided a peek into the fantasy world of the right-wing one percent, in which fantasies of an incipient Hitler-esque terror are just slightly beyond the norm. The Journal editorial defines persecution of the one percent as the existence of public disagreement. Liberals are mocking Perkins, therefore Perkins is basically right. For Perkins to be wrong — for the rich to enjoy the level of deference the Journal deems appropriate — a billionaire could compare his plight to the victims of the Holocaust and nobody would make fun of him at all."

Tbogg:We were dead before the ship ever sank: "I have written previously about the very distressing, by which I mean ‘high-larious’, legal woes of National Review which is being sued for letting contributor Mark Steyn defame climate scientist Michael Mann for comparing him to child molester Jerry Sandusky on the internet pages of NRO....

Rand Simberg... attacking Mann’s research and, trying to be topical, referenced the fact that he teaches at Penn State as the basis for an oh-so-clever PSU Michael Mann = Penn State football coach/kid rapist Jerry Sandusky analogy.... Mark Steyn... LOL’d and repeated.... When Mann protested, CEI backed down and deleted the offending lines but not the rest of the post.... National Review Editor Rich Lowry... under the impression that he was William F. Badass Jr.... told Mann and his attorneys to pound sand.

For months, the White House and its allies mocked critics of Barack Obama’s leadership, arguing that no president has “Green Lantern” superhero powers. Now these same people are predicting that Obama can salvage his agenda by waving a magical “pen and phone.” The contradiction illustrates how far partisans will go to defend a flailing presidency, grasping at slogans and insult…

A contradiction! Who are those people who used to understand how American government works but now think that Obama could get his legislative agenda through a Republican House if he only had the leadership to lead, with leadership? Here’s an exhaustive list of the “same people” who have allegedly changed their minds:

White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer

I don’t recall Pfeiffer ever making fun of Green Laternists, but I’m certainly sure he alone cannot constitute all of “the same people.” But at least he said something really dumb, right?

“He is going to look in every way he can with his pen and his phone to try to move the ball forward,” Pfeiffer said. “We’re putting an extra emphasis on it in 2014.”

So a White House adviser says that Obama will try to do stuff, with no claim at all about whether it will work. But to Fournier, that’s more than enough evidence that everyone agrees with him that Obama could have changed the game by doubling down on the Overton Window, but he didn’t. even. TRY!

People who believe facts are nothing think you'll fall for anything. Call it Niallism.

This is my last word (well, last words) on Niall Ferguson, whose Newsweek cover story arguing that Obama doesn't deserve a second-term has drawn deserved criticism for its mendacity from Paul Krugman, Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Noah Smith, my colleagues James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates and myself. The problem isn't Ferguson's conclusion, but how Ferguson reaches his conclusion. He either presents inaccurate facts or presents facts inaccurately. The result is a tendentious mess that just maintains a patina of factuality -- all, of course, so Ferguson can create plausible deniability about his own dishonesty.

Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher that reported that respondents to the 1994 General Social Survey who had daughters were more likely to identify with the Republican Party.... Economists Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee published a paper with the exact opposite finding.... I took a look at both papers and can’t immediately see a resolution.... The existence of two published results in the exact opposite direction suggest, at the very least, that any effects are likely to be lower than claimed in the published articles....